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30 September 2009

A Big Thanks for Leah Culver's oAuth Library

I believe that one of the best things to do here on this blog, is to mention those who helped Baralbait see the light.

One of my major problems when I started creating Baralbait was that I wanted to have applications to be installed on GPS-enabled mobile phones in order to help people update their current Geo-Location on Baralbait. And the problem here was that it was not feasible to start writing different applications for the different mobile phones out there, especially that I have limited resources and mobile programming knowledge. Also Nokia charges developers if they want to interact with their GPS APIs, as they have to purchase special certificates and use them to sign their code.

Then all at a sudden, I've discover FireEagle which serves as a Location Updates hub. The service accepts location updates from different applications, and on the other hand services such as Baralbait can poll FireEagle to get a certain user's current location. So I wanted to have an oAuth library to use in order to interact with FireEagle, espcially that the oAuth protocoal was too hard for me to understand and implement myself :)

So, in brief, I've to say that if Leah's oAuth library wasn't there, no one would have been able to updated his/her location on Baralbait easily, and the service would have missed one of it's major features.